How are your netbooks holding up? Kinda slow, huh? Doesn’t run YouTube and Hulu videos up to your high standards? Well, I have some pleasant news for you.
On Monday Intel announced the introduction of their latest Atom processors: the N450 (or “Pine Trail”), the D410 D510, and the NM10 Express chipset. The single-core D410 and dual-core D510 are designed for nettops. What I want to focus on is the N450 chip. What’s so different about the 1.66GHz N450 chip is that it integrates the Intel graphics and memory controller directly into the processor. This results in a smaller processor that can be placed into even smaller devices such as tiny netbooks. The N450 is 60% smaller and 20% more efficient than its predecessor. Clocked at 1.66GHz, the N450 single-core chip has a 512kb cache, only supports, DDR2 memory, and is limited to handling 2GB of RAM. After playing around with a new netbook from Asus, fellow bloggers at Engadget report back bittersweet news: while the new chip provides longer battery life it lacks in the performance category, especially in graphics. Cue NVIDIA Ion 2…
Yesterday NVIDIA announced that its next generation of Ion graphics chips will be compatible with Intel’s new “Pine Trail” processors. They will be available sometime during the first quarter of 2010. This is very good news. Those of you who are crying on a daily basis because your netbooks won’t load HD YouTube videos or stream shows from Hulu in a normal speedy manner will have Ion to thank for the resolution of your woes. Atom + Ion is a match made in heaven, and I can’t wait for the next generation versions of these two to live in harmony with one another. In fact, I still haven’t purchased a netbook because I’ve been waiting for this very moment to happen. Expect to see a slew of netbooks sporting these new chips during next month’s CES.